"Who Fights with the Sword Dies with the Sword": An Artist's Perspective on AI - part 1, with Ela Orleans, audiovisual artist and composer

With the rise of AI, artists have found themselves in a profoundly altered landscape. Is AI destined to be an amazing new instrument of creativity or a new source of unfair exploitation - notably, at the hands of AI companies who have already used the work of artists widely, with neither credit nor compensation, for training AI systems? In this episode, I interview artist and academic Ela Orleans, a Polish composer and audiovisual artist who grew up in Communist Poland and currently lives in Paris. Ela is well known as an artist who works with digital technology. Less well known is the fact that she is also an expert on artists' copyright, having completed her PhD in this field at the University of Glasgow in 2022. Given her unusual background in art and artists' rights, Ela is uniquely well positioned to comment on her experiences with AI, and in this discussion, I found her to be refreshingly frank and open about what she thinks the future holds.   Please join us here for part 1 of this 2-part discussion on artists and AI.